Having the right web hosting provider is crucial to your success online. It can spell the difference between retaining a customer or losing one. For example, if your site is slow to load or down, your customer might look for another site, most likely a competitor. Therefore reliability is a must. iPage is a top choice when it comes to reliability. A minimum uptime rate is 99.5% otherwise you’re in trouble. Another thing to consider is the cost. Shared hosting platforms are best for bloggers or small websites. Web Hosting Hub (see review) offers shared hosting making it cost effective. However for big businesses, you would require VPS or dedicated server especially with big e-commerce sites. Our analysis of inMotion shows that it’s highly versatile. They cater from small to big businesses. For more information on web hosting, visit Web Hosting Provider List.
Uptime and reliability
Whether you’re dealing with a web host, or an ISP, often times they will include an uptime guarantee. Usually it will be something like 99.9%, 99.99%, or even something that’s referred to as the five 9s, 99.999% uptime. For the web hosting industry, a typical guarantee for a legitimate shared package is the three nines. This is a pretty modest contract and allows the company a bit of flexibility. When all said and done that comes out to roughly 9 hours of downtime per year. A dedicated host might have a little stricter agreement and offer up four nines. This allows less than an hour of missed service per year. Usually five 9 contracts are only seen on leased lines directly from an ISP.
Speed
Speed is pretty hard to judge without actually using the host’s product. Most of the time their main web page will be hosted on its own server, on its own IP, on its own dedicated bandwidth. For people buying shared hosting, the best bet is to simply read reviews. Look out for companies that offer unlimited bandwidth, and other promises that are costly and hard to keep. More legitimate companies will have a money back guarantee policy, and even allow you a one month trial of their product.
Package
There are a few different package types that a web host will offer. For small websites with little traffic, shared hosting is the best. Your website is on the same server has hundreds, perhaps thousands of other websites sharing resources, IPs, and bandwidth. For medium sized businesses, a VPS is the best choice. This gives you an administrator user on the operating system your website runs on. Your website will run in a virtual machine, and the server is split into far less sections than shared hosts. Typically you will share your server with around 10 or so other people. Lastly, there’s dedicated – you have the entire server to yourself. You don’t share any resources, have your own IP, and you typically purchase a dedicated line as well.
Summary
While there are a ton of factors to picking out the best web hosting company, it’s far from a hard task. Once you have the correct package picked out, it’s really only a matter of reading reviews from previous customers. You should probably avoid websites that only exist to review web hosts. These websites typically get money for referring new customers, so they’ll say anything to make a buck. Forums, blog comments, and other sources of reviews that don’t rely on people with a financial interest in the company are all good places to start.